Competitors such as YouTube and Facebook have been doing 360-degree videos for quite some times now. Twitter is joining the crowd with its own fuss, and it's doing pretty great.
During the National Basketball Association (NBA) Finals on June 3rd, 2016, Twitter is joining the crowd by providing the more immersive view for the first time. Partnering with Samsung which is sponsoring the video, Twitter's 360-degree video is shot using its Gear 360 camera.
According to Samsung, the content was pre-recorded, and not broadcast live.
Twitter director of content partnerships and Twitter Amplify Mike Park said:
The NBA Finals 360-degree videos is exclusive to Twitter. The NBA who have all of the footage (pregame warmups and shooting, entrances, captains' meetings and postgame) of the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden State Warriors game, shared it via the league's Twitter account and the Samsung Mobile U.S. account.
@StephenCurry30 arrives for Game 1 of the #NBAFinals. #Gear360 presented by @SamsungMobileUS https://t.co/kwxerqlAdV
— NBA (@NBA) June 3, 2016
While 360-degree video is somehow a great experience to give, Twitter is approaching the business unlike YouTube or Facebook. Unlike them which host their own 360-degree videos, Twitter's first experience on 360 is hosted by websites off Twitter.
Users who wish to view the content, should access the website's cards. So starting with Game 1 of NBA Finals, Twitter cards linked out to videos shot using the method, allowing users to drag around the scene in a 360 all around video.
Twitter is promising "exclusive content" over the course of the series.
Twitter's move to partner with NBA came after its 2015's partnership which helped NBA in creating the NBA Finals Timeline where users could see related tweets, commentary and expert analysis, including exclusive video and of course, Vines.
Twitter has a great strategy by partnering with big names to promote itself. But the catch is that Twitter's 360-degree video are slightly underwhelming if compared to Facebook and YouTube.
If comparing to those two competitors, they have native 360-degree contents hosted with them and not elsewhere. And by having the feature as native, users aren't required to leave the platform to view. This was, for example, demonstrated by Facebook when the social giant company shot a 360 of Grand Central Terminal.
For sports and basketball fans, the content is also rather dull. 360-degree video contents for sports is still relatively new, but can indeed bring a whole new world of experience. But the limitation is technology which has shown to be impractical. Like for example bringing the Samsung Gear 360 camera to capture everything on the court.
But still, the strategy should work well for Twitter. 360-degree video is an important step for the microblogging platform given the popularity of its Periscope live video streaming tool. With the increasing choices of 360-degree camera for sale and coming to the market, Twitter has a compelling reason to figure out how this type of streaming should work and how to leverage Samsung's brand as its sponsor.